The top 100 factors in optimising a page

[simonm]

About a year or more ago there was a thread where we listed the main factors to consider when optimising a page or web site. I've tried to find it but at the risk of repeating what we have already done, can we do it again or perhaps somebody can include a link to that thread?
Here's a start

• the presence of the search term on the page;
  additional instances of the term as text
  the term as an alt text
  is the term part of the description
  within the H1, H2 or H3
  is it part of the domain name
  is it a generic term or a trade name
  is it in the file name
  relevance of the page which is a function of the number and relevance of pages that in turn link to that page;
  How relevant the links coming in to the page are both as a function of the content on the originating page and the text within the link
  Is the web site on DMOZ (Open Directory Project)
  The age of the domain name
  How long the content has been online
  Quality of the content - broken links
  Accessibility
  Frequency of updates to the web site
  Associated terms on the web page (see Google sets)
  size of web page - amount of text
  size of web site
  relevance to country of search - .co.uk or .com
  duplicate content

All contributions gratefully accepted. I think we got to about 100 relevant factors in optimising a web page.

Simon

[KeithO]

I made a word document while slacking off at work that will more than contribute to this. It is written prejagger though so its time for an update soon:

How to build a search engine friendly Web site

In order to build an effective Web site, here are numerous things to study, learn, cherish, and implement to make it to the top of search engine results.

Site Design:
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Web sites with only images cannot be indexed by search engine spiders. They cannot view the text on the images or verify that the text is appropriate for the content linked to.
• Design for web standards. Sites that pass W3C validation are more accessible to all browsers.
• Implement usage of <h1> tags as opposed to [b] or [b]. <h1> tags are viewed as more important and the beginning of an important section while [b], and to a lesser extent [b], are viewed as emphasis.
• Minimize site load time. Over 35% of web users are still using dial up access. Don’t neglect them.
• On sites where image based navigation is used, use appropriate <alt> tags for those users who have images disabled and include a text based navigation at the bottom of the site for increased accessibility.
• Include a site map that lists and links every page in the Web site. This will aide the search engine spiders in accessing the entire Web site and indexing more of it. If the web site has more than 100 pages, divide the site map into multiple pages to avoid tripping a spam filter.
• Don’t include <meta keyword> and <meta description> tags in an include file. They need to be individually tailored to each page for maximum exposure. Other, not specific <meta> tags may be put in an include file.
• Do not design a website using frames. Spiders are easily confused by them and will leave if they have difficulty navigating. On the same note, do not design a Web site fully in Flash. Including Flash movies for additional eye candy or tools is ok. Spiders do not index them yet.
• Put all JavaScript and CSS in external files and link to them. Sites designed entirely in xHTML and CSS will have a faster download time, are easier to maintain, and allow for more focus to be put on the content.
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Use logical folder and file names. www.yoursite.com/thisfolder/thisfile.html is looked upon less than www.yoursite.com/this_folder/this_file.html.
• Do not combine grammar tags with your <title> words. For example, “Your Site: Home” is seen as 3 words “Your”, “Site:”, and “Home”. Instead use “Your Site – Home” which is seen as 4 words “Your”, “Site”, “-“, and “Home”.
• Be descriptive in the <title> tag. Use keywords here for enhanced visibility, “Your Site – Widget Headquarters – Home”. If you are wanting more region specific traffic, include your location in the <title> tag: “Your Site – Widget Headquarters of Orlando, Florida – Home”.

Keywords
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Tailor the keywords you want to compete for to the Web site. Don’t try to force keywords in or you will lose focus on the Web site for customers.
• If your Web site is discussing widgets, make sure that it is quickly known to customers. Put them in <h1>, <title>, links, <alt>, and [b] tags.
• Find out how much competition you have for your product. Do a search in various search engines using some general keywords. “Widgets” has nearly 6 million hits in Google, 4 million in Yahoo!, and 800,000 hits in MSN. This will help understand the challenge ahead.
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Take a step back and look at the content that you have on a given page. Are there specific words or phrases that are used frequently about your product? If not, are there many areas where generic nouns are used such as “It”, “These”, “We”, and “This” where you could put your keyword phrase in naturally? Include these specific keywords into your campaign
• Look at your <h1> tags. Did you use any of the specific words from them in the content of the page? Use those in your campaign.
• Do you use specifics enough? Going general only increases the difficulty of achieving top rankings. If you focus more on blue widgets and not much on red widgets, make sure the content reflects this. State specifically, “Your site has numerous outlets where we sell classic blue widgets, neo blue widgets, hovering blue widgets, and extreme blue widgets.” Reuse those specifics in your <h1>, <link>, and [b] tags.
• Don’t be overly specific. Consider home buying. When house hunting, would you be more likely to search for “Orlando Homes Baldwin Park” or “2353 square foot homes in Baldwin Park Orlando Florida”?
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Double check your spelling for the keywords
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Including local contact information for regional Web sites benefits the growing local search market.

Link campaigns:
• It has been proven that an effective link campaign from 10 quality Web sites is more beneficial to your site’s rankings than submitting your Web site to 100 search engines.
• Numerous shady companies promise to submit your Web site to 10,000 plus search engines. This is completely unnecessary. Can you personally even name 15 search engines? What makes you think your customers can? 90% of searches come from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
• Submitting your Web site to quality web directories is the cornerstone of any effective link campaign. Web directories use static, direct links rather than dynamic, session-based links that confuse search engine spiders.
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• When a search engine spider finds a link to your Web site, the quality rating from the linking web site will benefit yours. It will also queue the spiders to visit your Web site more quickly than if you submit it to be searched.
• Don’t submit your site to a link farm. Search engines have included filters that prevent numerous forms of spam. If a Web site has over 100 links on one page, this raises some flags for the search engines.
• When possible, include a good description of your Web site in the links.
• Have all links to your Web site be specific. If the referencing text is discussing your classic blue widgets, then have it link to www.yoursite.com/classic_blue_widgets.html.
• DMOZ (Open Directory Project) has a large backlog of links to validate and it may take several months before being included.
• Find industry related Web sites to get links from. Send an email to the webmaster requesting a link. They may require a link back before doing so. Don’t use a form letter for this. Tailor it to each related Web site and explain the benefits.
• Determining a quality link can be difficult sometimes. Shady companies will agree to link to your site but will include a <nofollow> tag in the link which will deter a spider from recognizing it as a valid link.

When you don’t want search engines indexing a page…
• Creating a robots.txt file will set the ground rules for a search engine to follow. Here is a proper robots.txt file with explaination:
# /robots.txt file for http://yoursite.com/

User-agent: webcrawler
Disallow:

User-agent: lycra
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp
Disallow: /logs
-The first line, starting with '#', specify a comment
-The first paragraph specifies that the robot called 'webcrawler' has nothing disallowed: it may go anywhere.
-The second paragraph indicates that the robot called 'lycra' has all relative URLs starting with '/' disallowed. Because all relative URL's on a server start with '/', this means the entire site is closed off.
-The third paragraph indicates that all other robots should not visit URLs starting with /tmp or /log. Note the '*' is a special token, meaning "any other User-agent"; you cannot use wildcard patterns or regular expressions in either User-agent or Disallow lines.
Two common errors:
o You shouldn't put more than one path on a Disallow line (this may change in a future version of the spec)
o Wildcards are _not_ supported: instead of 'Disallow: /tmp/*' just say 'Disallow: /tmp/'.
• Use this on sites that have a support section, to block access to templates, and secure areas.
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.

Other Tips:
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Having unique, quality content is your best asset.
• Each search engine has unique qualities they use to qualify a site’s rankings.
o Google looks at the quality of the content, link analysis, and accessibility (standards compliance).
o Yahoo! looks at content and processes the <meta> tags.
o MSN accepts many links, prefers content over links.
• Google has what they call a sandbox for new sites. The purpose of this sandbox is to hinder the effectiveness of fly-by-night, spam sites. All new sites are subject to the sandbox. What it does is reduce the rankings of sites in the sandbox for up to a year. Once the site has been judged as worthy of inclusion, it is pulled out and the rankings improve drastically. There is no way around this. Maintaining a link building campaign is a good way to help speed up
• Regularly update all your pages. Keeping things static will reduce the rankings over time. By keeping things fresh, you are giving the search engines something to look forward to when they visit next. This will also help to keep regular visits happening. When they start to detect that the content is pretty stale, the indexing becomes less frequent.
• Don’t use shady practices you wouldn’t feel comfortable justifying to your mother, father, grandma, grandpa or anyone else who you admire. Cloaking, redirecting, white-text-on-white-background tactics, and layering images over text are all practices that will put you on the bad side of the search engine results.
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Non-commercial sites can be listed in Yahoo!’s Directory for free. Businesses cost $299 and adult sites cost $600.
• Keep the overall page size to under 150k.
• A site should be structured so that the deepest content is no more than 3 clicks from the home page.
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.
• Keep a constant eye on the rankings. They can fluctuate from week to week. Try to figure out what is influencing the rankings and adjust your campaign accordingly.
• When building a dynamic page, refrain from using “&ID=” as it is frequently used to set a session and can deter a lot of search engine spiders.

[greeneagle]

Maybe this needs to be modified, to catch up with Jagger:

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/searc...ng-factors.php

If so, Since this is a well trafficked page, and somewhat established authoritive document, maybe you guys would want to write the authors and see if you can get together with them in subsequent mods.

Post-"Jagger", I definitely see some changes in priority, especially, that need to be made.

Ken

[aaron2005]

Realize that it will take time
Realize that it will take time
Realize that it will take time
Realize that it will take time

:D

[greeneagle]

"Time" is the problem for many, at this "time" of the year!

For those, I again recommend ... Utilize all other sources outside of natural SERP... Pull out all "stops" now!

Ken

[google junky]

Thank you simonm and KeithO. That's good stuff.
A list of most of the stuff I keep in my head, now in text format.
I did see a few things in the list I hadnt looked at before.

Google Junky

[Manpasand]

Originally Posted by simonm

About a year or more ago there was a thread where we listed the main factors to consider when optimising a page or web site.

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...578&highlight=
Is it you are looking? ;-)

[Duncan Pollock]

aaron beat me to it but, ha, ha, I can't resist wondering why Keith0 forgot to tell us:
• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.

Seriously: Excellent suff, all well worth re-reading and re-reading.

Duncan

[beanstalk]

Originally Posted by KeithO

• Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.

If only more client's would realize this is the case. ;)

[randfish]

Ken - Next time I ask for votes on the ranking factors, I'll be sure to ask for your input. I'm planning to do a redux in 4-5 months.

Do note that the current document is for ALL search engines in general, rather than just Google, so the Jagger update, much as it influenced the rankings of sites, shouldn't completely overhaul the list.

[simonm]

Hi Manpasand

Yes, that's the one. Thanks

Simon

[greeneagle]

randfish,

That is an important document you guys/gals put together.

I have recommended it in several threads such as;
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=56184, and to clients and business partners.

I'd be honored to help the team out in the future if I can.

Ken

[virtualtraveller]

Realize that it will take time for the search engines to increase your rankings.

Yes, this is certainly the dominant theme these days in Google and a sure-fire way to kill SERP spamming, but just how long is the big question.

IMO Google is shutting out too many good new sites because they aren't old enough. I've certainly seen SERPs favouring sites based on age, meaning it could take several years before you take your rightful place on page one (if you deserve it). In comparing one of my sites to its competitors I can see that we more than compete on ibl count, quality of ibls, on-page SEO and so on, yet languish 10 places below. We are only a year old, the others have been there 4, some haven't had any new content in years. In Yahoo and MSN the site ranks top five alongside those ranking similarly in Google.

So, in addition to the sandbox, I propose that there is certainly;

1. age filters on new links
2. some sort of consideration about age of domain and pages
3. a deliberate retardation on rankings of sites that have rising up the rankings too quickly
4. a favouring of sites that have occupied the top of the SERPs for a prolonged period - some sites just sit there and never move despite undertaking apparently no SEO activity

The waiting game can be very frustrating when you see old, stale sites above you that really don't deserve to be there.

Of course, the internet is a very dynamic thing and web technologies and content are evolving quickly, it seems counter-productive of Google to shut out the newer sites like this. Just because they are new doesn't mean they aren't relevant.